Back-and-Forth from cold to mild: ‘normal’ for late January

Colder air breezing through the region tonight and early Tuesday will really bring the chill! Expect a temperature plunge toward the mid-20s tonight; the breeze will make it feel more like the upper 10s and lower 20s by morning.

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Tuesday stacks up as the coldest of the past ten days with a high only reaching the 40s in the afternoon. Expect full sunshine and a light breeze Tuesday, and we’ll get another hard freeze Tuesday night before a slight, brief warm-up on Wednesday and Thursday.

A ‘normal’ end to January: The first 20 days of January were extremely cold: cold enough to be 13th-coldest in Huntsville’s recorded weather history. The ‘thaw’ set in, and we’ve righted the ship to some degree running a solid -3.6ºF compared to average through the weekend.

’Normal’ for Alabama and Tennessee in late January and early February is not a single number; it’s really more of a range of daily changes in the weather from colder to milder, drier to wetter. This time of year is characterized by some of the greatest day-to-day changes in a 12-month span, and that’s exactly how the weather pattern will set up for the next week to 10 days.

Rumors of snow and cold: Active weather patterns can be a lot of fun to follow if you’re into the nuts and bolts of meteorology; however, if you just want to know what the weather is doing, it can be a little harder to follow with all of the crazy things you see on social media.

Rest assured, there will be numerous ‘model’ snow storms and ‘model’ record cold waves showing up in your feed over the next couple of weeks. It’s entirely possible that we could have either or both of those, but there’s no way to ‘know’ anything concrete (or even have a good idea about) something more than a few days in advance.

The image here shows the pattern change: colder in the east, warmer in the west. Some of that bitterly cold air blows in Friday, and another shot will arrive Sunday.

As of now, we could have a close call with some rain mixing with some light wintry precipitation Sunday and Sunday night as arctic air comes blasting back into the region. That’s a very low-probability, low-impact idea right now.

There is also another low-end chance of something wintry and cold developing next week.

It will get very cold again through the month of February. Will it be as bad or worse than early January? It’s too early to know the specifics, but there is still plenty of winter ahead of us!